Research seminar Prof. Arnoud Lagendijk

Organized
by TiREG and TIG

Bio

Arnoud Lagendijk
researches regional development and the processes of regionalization in
Europe, with emphasis on innovation and economic cluster policies. He also
examines the distribution of alternative socio-economic practices (including
Slow Food) and policy concepts (area development, public transport) across the
world. Both themes are analyzed employing a so-called 'relational approach',
probing the nexus between global and local processes.

Seminar

During the research seminar, Prof. Lagendijk will present the paper
titled ‘Regional Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: towards characterization and
recognition’.

In this paper, Prof. Lagendijk claims that successful entrepreneurial
ecosystems display the following set of three characteristics:

they
are self-directed, intelligent governance systems;

they
use distributed practical intelligence and innovation competencies to boost and
serve growth markets, and

they
manifest reflexive capacities, distributed over human champions and non-human
devices (e.g. monitoring), to advance practices of collective learning and to
steer effectively between the paths of collaboration and competition.

According to him, however, these characteristics receive little
recognition in mainstream policy making and academic research, although
evidence supports their validity. Both policy-makers and academics appear to
guide their work by a view of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems as other-directed
(supported by general rankings and quantitative profiling), fueled by external
intelligence (privileging policy and academic analysis) and with a rather
instrumental take on collective learning (seen as a practice rather than
working philosophy).

In light of this, Prof. Lagendijk concludes that, while there are
growing, effective networks of intermediaries supporting learning across
Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, policy-makers and academics need to leave their
comfort zone of disengaged, transcendental analysis to recognize and foster
successful entrepreneurial ecosystems.